Necklace with Pendant

This piece of jewelry illustrates the transition from the more conservative handmade jewelry of the Arts and Crafts style to the modernist jewelry that embraced the abstraction of the twentieth century. Charles Price was a metalsmith at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, founded in imitation of the Bauhaus in Germany to teach good design coupled with handcraftsmanship. In the 1930s, as Price was creating this necklace, Alexander Calder, the wellknown American sculptor, began to create jewelry that spoke in the modernist idiom shared by Arthur Smith and the other jewelers.